Hunger Games: The Cullen's Edition
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: Not related to the books, except by Emily's amusement. A Cullen by Cullen break down on the physical and personal hungers of these beautiful, multifaceted characters.
1. The Compassionate Doctor

**Summary: **Challenge piece from Sunny. Prompt given "Hunger Games," with no relation or knowledge of either canons, but a mutual love of vampires, werewolves, and the urges that underlie all peoples, fictive and not. The breakdown: Part I will be about the obvious hunger of _the vampire_, and part two will be about the not-always-obvious hunger of _the person_ in question.

**Spoilers: **All of canon. There will be one for each Cullen in order by arrival. At least the first five are done. And it will be complete by early next week. I'll place them up one a day until it completes.

* * *

**The Compassionate Doctor **

**I.** Carlisle came into this world a blur of pain and hunger, alone and abandoned.

Maker-less. Directionless. A jangle of child-like impulses, louder than everything except passing heartbeats, and, somehow, without much memory of the life before him, he clung to the last ghost of humanity instead of evicting it from himself like the aberrant wisp of a dream listing through to wakefulness.

As much as he longed to rend and eviscerate, to tear into the people passing him, still the thoughts of their deaths, of not having the right, plagued even his momentary fantasies. He struggled against the darkness within him, driven by demons beating within his own breast where his heart no longer did.

He wanted always to help others. His coda, his drive. From herbs in packets to the first printed books. But this was desire he pressed into, drive and goal and being. Not hunger. Blood passed as a longing, a little fainter with each passing decade. Never not consistent, but less forceful.

Even in Volterra, where a bacchanal of blood welcomed every day.

Hunger was not with him there. Awareness, and want, but not hunger.

~||x||~

**II.** Indeed, Hunger, itself, would not strike him down until nearly two centuries later.

Two centuries that would press him past torture, and revolution, into a world of starvation not so unknown, but tiring with the ever-present turn of time. And it would be the only time it would ever hit him as hard or as suddenly, without preparation or contemplation toward all the possible futures.

When he dipped his head down, biting into fevered flesh, asking God and a too beautiful boy-child to forgive him. Reveling in the taste of blood for the first time as, promise be damned, a small part of what was left of his soul demanded, against all good intentions toward that human world, and gave into the savage, shattering need to finally not be alone any longer.

The act, and rebellion, that would open the door to everything else that would happen.

~||x||~

**Next: The Golden Boy **


	2. The Golden Boy

**The Golden Boy**

**I.** Edward Masen closed his eyes dying of Spanish Influenza and opened them again in a brand new world. One full of unquenchable thirst and cacophonic noise, even inside his every thought within his head, with one radiant point of focus: Carlisle Cullen.

The doctor who had been seeing to all of his family. The vampire who had had saved his life, by taking it. The beacon of goodness that had prevailed against the onslaught of so much evil that had been thrust upon him for centuries. The man who had walked completely alone for all of that time.

Born the epitome of Carlisle's goodness as well as selfishness, Edward could do no less than set all of the goals of his life, even the entirety of his newborn infancy, on par with Carlisle's ideals. And he met each of them. Beautiful and talented. Arrogant and idealistic enough to make himself keep to each of his promises to Carlisle as well as himself.

For all the never ending thirst he never slipped and accidentally took a life. A claim that would only ever hold among three of them: Carlisle, Rosalie, and Edward, himself.

But never having taken a life _accidentally_ was not the same thing as never taking a life. As Edward would and had taken many lives by the end of his first decade, once he'd rejected the entirety of his makers' way of life. All of those lives painstakingly chosen. Only the murderers, the rapists, the psychopaths. Stalked down and eradicated in darkest glory. Until he couldn't differentiate how he was not one of them any longer and returned to Carlisle and Esme in shambles.

With a knowledge, and lust, and shame, and understanding that could only be met and shared with his last brother, who would not arrive until three decades after the last human life he would ever take passed from the world.

~||x||~

**II.** Hunger could have been like a scent that wrapped itself around Edward Cullen long before the introduction of his singer. Thirst might be a daily commonality, but until that droll little biology class Edward cared as little about blood as he did about people around him.

It might be a nice vague idea, but there was an ocean of blood already on his hands that made Lady Macbeth look saintly. Which choked most of his being, most of his daily life, most of that hunger in its first breath, no matter what people might say about him being forgiven, being the best of them. The want to atone, to be more, do more, fulfill exorbitantly high expectations he ascribed to the feelings of others.

Living with, and being made by, first with a man who never fell even in the blackest of conditions. Then, with a mother made of endless compassion and forgiveness. Eighty years of living with three couples, in every single word and act they did, both in his house and in his head, that were perfectly suited to each other and joyously relaxed about unending expanse of the future rolling out before them. Wanting, and never less than aware he was lacking in comparison.

His musical enamoration even matched Carlisle's medical in one hunger, and one lifelong denial: that of being known, seen, and recognized for their work. Neither could slip and become overtly noticeable, traceable, having to moving on when the threat or temptation to it might seem to be growing out from the whimsy of a impatient dream as old as they were.

And then, of course there was Isabella Swan. Emmett's laudable tales of his singers were nothing compared to gravity defying need that her scent struck him down with every time. Nor could it have any claims on the sheer gripping, maddeningly obsession mystery of her silent thoughts. Or either the love that shackled him to her existence, beyond hope, beyond doubt, beyond sanity.

~||x||~

**Next: The Loving Mother **


	3. The Loving Mother

**The Loving Mother **

**I.** Being the first person to make to slip, to make 'mistake,' in the Cullen household was a heavy burden. It was a high bar, waking up into the life of temptation next to Carlisle who had never in centuries of time tasted blood, save to change the two people in his family, and Edward, who never said it was easy, but took it as a point of pride and loyalty that he'd never _for Carlisle_.

It was something that took her far longer to master. Not that either of them looked down on her for it. Being told it wasn't your fault, it was in her nature, that there was more time to get adjusted was helpful but also made her feel excluded from their private club. In way that was already highlighted by the way they talked, consistently, only half aloud.

The guilt and shame ebbed with the rise of control, but in the end she would never forget the faces of those people, question what their lives would have been if hadn't been for her actions, even as she moved forward with her own. And it gave her, unlike her husband, a more intimate understanding of Edward when he returned in the late thirties.

~||x||~

**II.** The greatest actual hunger of Esme's life, the same as an Evenson and a Cullen, was that of being a mother. Which her life gave to her in waves. First a son who's life she held above her own, whose future forced her into action, but would not survive what she would.

Which made even for finding herself whole in her mate, a barren hole which resided inside her heart for her first years learning who she would be and what she would make of this new world. Before everything changed in the thirties. A change that would begin a rippling effect that would shape the rest of her days.

A second first-son, made of gold and shadows, and never asking, who would claim her first. A daughter whose every sharpness spoke of her need for tenderness. Another son made of enough bravado, laughter, and a carefree fierceness to balance out those first two.

Then another pair, when life least expected it. A twinkling daughter, made of light blown into a kaleidoscope of color, along with her knight. Polite and refrained and wickedly amusing.

And last a daughter made of silk and steel, born to walk into their way and demand her rightful place in it, adopted long before she would cross the divide into being Family. Who would bring to their family the first child in every aspect of speaking ever.

~||x||~

**Next: The Ice Princess**


	4. The Ice Princess

**The Ice Princess **

**I.** When he said, "Let her go," it was hard to know whose shock was greater, Rosalie's or Carlisle's.

Since the moment she'd set her sights on the attentions of Edward Cullen, when the Cullen's had arrived in Rochester, he had made it embarrassingly clear, even when he was immaculately social and polite, he didn't care what she did or who she did it with. He'd dropped being immaculately social and polite the day her red eyes opened, and added to it not caring what she said or thought.

He'd made his opinion of her, and Carlisle's choice to save her, apparent. So having him appear from nowhere, taking her side in the argument of what she wanted to do to her assailants (when he, better than anyone standing there, would have known implicitly down to the exact detail what she intended to do to them) was nothing short of a great shock. To everyone.

She came home first, alone, wrapped in only his coat, without a single drop of blood on her. Edward not too long after. Edward didn't talk about the night in detail. He assented when Carlisle asked if she'd accomplished what she set out to, but he hadn't said anything else. The only other thing he offered after that, suddenly, while Rosalie remained red-eyed and more irritable than ever, swapping sated vengeance for heightened blood withdrawal, was that their house filled with music from her childhood.

She rejected his turnabout pious faking of understanding her plight, not understanding for years to come still, about his still too recent Great Fall From Grace, and how his words to Carlisle that night barely admitted to her then, what the other two couldn't have missed - that he, reliving with the same recurring pristine memory of her last night each time she did, would likely do it if she didn't.

But it didn't and wouldn't have mattered then. She was too busy still. Hating with such scathing, biting icy, passion those, both mortal and immortal, who had brought her to what she was now, what she never could stop being, or be again. Swearing she would never forgive or be like any of them.

And in the turn of decades and centuries, the part about not drinking another drop of blood so long as she lived held true at least.

~||x||~

**II.** Hunger was never about blood to Rosalie Hale. Always Hale; and never Cullen. Hunger was about a single thing at the bottom of all the faces it would wear - the life, and death, powerful and assuming men had raped and robbed her of in one night.

She'd concede with an annoyed scoff to being spoiled and conceited-it was hard not to be when you were the most beautiful creature anyone alive or dead had ever seen-but beauty was a cruel, double edged sword. Beauty was the reason her once-fiancé had taken all that she had and left her dying in a street. Beauty was, if not the reason, the one of the reasons Carlisle had kept her, changing her, in the hopes of her becoming Edward's mate.

Beauty was the reason every few years every single mirror in the Cullen house would be reduced to sparkling shards, only infuriating her further when they would only ground into smaller and smaller pieces in her untouched skin.

She might have softened, infinitesimally, toward the Cullen's during her first two years, Edward aside, as she learned who they were, especially with Esme's soft touch, and her forgiveness of Carlisle may have started when he gave into her plea to change Emmett, but even he, himself, wasn't a hunger. He was the love of her life, but he was like the water that could bank her. He was never the impetus of the reason she'd had to save him.

Not when he made her think of Vera. Of the life she wanted, that he could never grant her, no matter how much love and acceptance and understanding he could give over time. To be a happy wife, to be a mother surrounded by darling, charming little children. The deepest rift within her soul, broken by that night, that could not be fixed by the endless clothes or sex, compassion or broken mirrors.

Her greatest hunger (and jealousy) lived in the moment she stepped in front of her newest, still human, sister-in-law and let her first brother know if he did anything to hurt the child growing inside Bella, she wouldn't hesitate in taking off his head.

~||x||~

**Next: The Big Brother **


	5. The Big Brother

**The Big Brother**

**I.** Emmett Cullen was a walking contradiction.

The last Cullen made by Carlisle, he moved into his new life with far less fanfare or concern for his new situation than the epic family storm that met his almost-dying. The youngest born and yet a hulk in comparison to any of them. Towering over them all and the strongest even once the newborn phase had worn off. A cross between a hard working country boy and a loyal bulldog, who saw everything in simple, black and white, terms.

His introduction was what made the group of ragtag Cullen's (and one Hale) into a family, by smoothing the edges of their Rose and actually drawing out the more golden, hilarious side of Edward. He was, also, the first one of them to be completely cavalier about accidents and mistakes, about seeing any merit in living by Carlisle's one rule.

It wasn't that he didn't feel badly for them, or regretful for his lack of control. It was that after a good half day spent focusing on it, he put each one away. The mistake. The person. The focus. Like a photograph going into a box.

Every normal person. Even his two singers.

It was brilliant in some ways. But, also, frustrating.

As it led to him being the one who slipped up most.

~||x||~

**II.** Emmet would tell you he was the luckiest of the Cullen's.

Both when he closed his eyes the last time alive, and the first time he opened them as a vampire he saw there exactly what he wanted most in the whole world: his angel and his savior - Rosalie Hale. A woman whose beauty was only outdone by the shadowed, hollow sadness which resided deep in her eyes.

A sadness that he would spend every day for the rest of time trying to take away from her piece by piece. There was nothing he would not do or get if it would cause her face to break into a smile, for the air to fill with the sweet sound of her rare laughter. Even get remarried every four or five years.

And it wasn't as though their beginning wasn't complicated and awkward. Emmett had thought he was dying, Rosalie had needed to save him for an unknown reason and neither of them actually knew who the other person was at all when he opened his eyes.

But he was forthright, guileless, gameless and unwaveringly devoted to her from that second.

Which was, they all agreed, one of the reasons it all went as smoothly as it did. When it did.

And once he had her, the only thing that could really make any day of the future eternity better was a great fight with the biggest beast or vampire he could find, with a good bet riding on it.

~||x||~

**Next: The Loyal Soldier **


End file.
